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Here’s a trick you can do for your next house party: fill the pool with non-Newtonian fluid and have people run across it, dance all over it, ride their bikes over it and so forth. Like, come on dude, you’re walking on water, how can you not have fun? We’ve seen the magic of non-Newtonian…
Hey man, remember that time in Berlin in ’71 when Deep Purple just like totally blew the minds of all those German kids by playing Into the Fire? Here, this should help.
Argentina’s beaches are getting quite dangerous during the southern hemisphere’s summer. 70 people were injured by a swarm of piranhas about two weeks ago and now lightning has killed three teens and injured 22 people in a seaside spa of Villa Gesell, a coastal town in the province of Buenos Aires. Earth can be quite…
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. Tracks by participants will be added to this playlist as…
A few years ago, a documentary came out that introduced longtime New York legend Bill Cunningham to the world at large. The film was fantastic—now streaming on Netflix!—and made it pretty much impossible not to fall in love with the octogenarian photographer who, for decades, has biked boldly through the Big Apple’s crowded avenues capturing…
The only thing cooler than gawking at record-breaking architecture is watching record-breaking architecture get built. The tallest hotel in North America, a Marriott Residence Inn on top of a Marriott Courtyard, just opened in Times Square. This is what it took to build the tower. https://gizmodo.com/inside-the-highest-hotel-rooms-on-earth-1497119712 https://gizmodo.com/inside-the-highest-hotel-rooms-on-earth-1497119712
This coming spring 2014 semester I will, again, be teaching my course on the role of sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. The class meets Wednesdays from noon until 2:50pm. There are 15 weeks in all, running from January 29 through May 14 (there’s no class on March…
We’re already well aware that the muffin top is the irrefutable epitome of all that is good about muffins. But did you know that this marvel of modern culinary science can still be improved upon? Say hello to the geometric muffin mold. The tins come with two sets of three differently shaped toppers, each with…
American futurism gets pretty dark during bad economic times. Many people start to see technology as the enemy, like they did in the 1930s and 1970s. And people generally feel less optimistic for the future. https://gizmodo.com/18-bizarre-letters-to-the-future-that-only-70s-kids-wil-1451498047 But new research shows that it’s not just futurism that becomes more gloomy during economic recessions. When the economy…
In almost every sci-fi movie worth re-watching, it seems that us humans are always less technologically advanced, dumber and only serve as a mere speed bump into an alien race eliminating humans to take over our planet and suck Earth dry of its resources. We’re always the weaker ones in alien wars. Well, what if…
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live in cartoon, consider visiting Limerick, Ireland—where a street artist recently turned a broken down gas station into a full-fledged color party. Maser, a globally known Irish graffiti artist, calls the finished work “No.27: A Nod to Ed Ruscha.” That nod, of course, is in…
Next time you take a bath ponder this: Scientists believe soap bubbles are capable of predicting “the intensity of deadly hurricanes and typhoons.” According to physicists from the University of Bordeaux, the rotation on the vortices of bubbles (i.e. the fluid that spins on the bubble’s membrane) “acts the same way as huge weather systems.”…
I am a dope when it comes to constellations; identifying Orion’s Belt and the Dippers (Big and Little) is about as deep as my skills go when it comes to eyeballing the heavens. This Crumpled Sky Map by Palomar seems like it would be an awesome tool to help me and my fellow heavens-blind folk…
France’s equivalent of DARPA has a lofty task for you. The National Research Agency is challenging engineers to design and build an autonomous oil-drilling robot that can operate continuously for six weeks at a time. And they’re willing to pay you handsomely. Well, to be exact, the French oil company Total is offering a €3.5…
Pure destruction. Top Gear wanted to see exactly what happens when a train smashes into a car stuck on the railroad tracks so they set up a test of their own: they put a minivan on the tracks and pummeled it with a speeding train. It gets pretty brutal. The train was going 78mph before…
When I meet Josh Westerhold at the offices of Project 100, the Las Vegas urban mobility startup that’s funded by the Downtown Project, we decide it would probably make sense to head out into downtown Vegas to tour their project area in person. From the other room, his co-worker has an even better idea: “Take…
If you’ve ever been to a touristy locale, you’ve likely seen flocks of tourists riding Segways—the electric, two-wheeled, lean-steered, (dorky) personal transporters. There are two major problems with them, though: They’re very expensive, and they’re very heavy. But a small company called Inmotion may have just solved those problems. I got to zip around the…
3D printers are the new must-have appliance for the modern kitchen. This year’s CES visitors were among the lucky few to taste-test the confectionary wonders of the Chefjet kitchen-ready printer (available for £3,000). From printed sugar cubes to multi-colored candies, these sweets are like delicious modern art. A jet print head is used to spray…
It’s probably one of the most amazing wonders of mother nature. Because of the severe cold weather, huge ice formations are starting to take shape along Niagara Falls—the American side—and the result is an incredible landscape of bubbling, whirling ice. Earlier this week, a picture of the frozen falls popped up online, but it turned…
Ever since Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on the NSA’s relentless snooping, the anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo’s been breaking traffic records practically everyday. The privacy-friendly site just announced that it answered a whopping one billion search queries last year. And things are only getting busier for DuckDuckGo. On January 7, the site had its…
